A Guide To Watering Your Lawn And Garden

Watering your lawn and garden will improve the quantitiy and quality of your flowers and grass. It is not time-consuming, and worth the effort.

Irrigating your lawn and garden is a necessity in most areas of the country. Even if you have never watered your lawn or garden before, the fact is that if you receive less than 1 inch a rain a week, you really should consider irrigation. Although in extreme cases, lack of water will cause your plants to shrivel, turn brown and die, even a small lack of water can affect the length and amount of blooms you get from flowers, and the plushness of the lawn.

Irrigating your lawn does not require any expensive equipment, as long as you have a garden hose, you can irrigate your lawn. Of course, equipment that you can purchase will make your job easier. For flower and vegetable beds, you may consider a "soaker hose". This hose has perforations along the length of it to allow water to flow slowly out all along the length of the hose. You simply lay the hose parallel to your rows, and turn it on. The water seeps out slowly and is absorbed into the ground. You lose little water to evaporation this way, and it goes directly to the plant roots. The drawback to this method is that these hoses do not last very long and are prone to rot easily. You can expect them to last a few summers at best. Another popular method of watering flower beds and vegetable gardens is to get a fan type nozzle for your garden hose. You will have to stand out and water the garden yourself, which can be a drawback if the garden is large, but the fan shape of the sprayer will cover more area than a traditional garden nozzle.

For irrigating your lawn there are a variety of sprinkler devices. Both oscillating and fountain type of sprinklers hook directly to your hose end and work well for a medium sized lawn. The only real problem with these methods are that they spray the water up and out, where it then falls back onto the lawn, meaning that you do lose some water to evaporation, and they will need to be moved around to cover all areas of your lawn. You can purchase timer to connect to your hose that will turn the water off after a set amount of time.

Permanent sprinklers such as pop up heads or fixed riser spray heads are convenient if you have a large yard to cover, but they too have their limitations. They have a tendency to spray water out at such a rate that it cannot all be absorbed immediately, and in the case of the fixed riser sprinkler, they can be difficult to mow around, and very dangerous if you have little children that run through your yard. You should choose the method that is most convenient for you and works best with your lawn.

Whichever method that you choose, you should make sure that you are not over watering, which can be just as damaging as under watering. If water pools in your footsteps, or there is active runoff of water visible, you should cut down on the length of your watering sessions. As you become more familiar with what your lawn requires this will become second nature to you.